I'm a technology, privacy, and information security reporter and most recently the author of the book This Machine Kills Secrets, a chronicle of the history and future of information leaks, from the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks and beyond.
I've covered the hacker beat for Forbes since 2007, with frequent detours into digital miscellania like switches, servers, supercomputers, search, e-books, online censorship, robots, and China. My favorite stories are the ones where non-fiction resembles science fiction. My favorite sources usually have the word "research" in their titles.
Since I joined Forbes, this job has taken me from an autonomous car race in the California desert all the way to Beijing, where I wrote the first English-language cover story on the Chinese search billionaire Robin Li for Forbes Asia. Black hats, white hats, cyborgs, cyberspies, idiot savants and even CEOs are welcome to email me at agreenberg (at) forbes.com. My PGP public key can be found here.

WikiLeaks' UFO Cables: More About Raelian Cult Than Alien Life

Despite its creative photoshopping, the UFO community may be disappointed by WikiLeaks' upcoming release.

If WikiLeaks didn’t already have the attention of the world’s conspiracy theorists, its founder Julian Assange grabbed the X-files crowd by their tin-foil helmet antennae in December, when he mentioned that the site plans to publish leaked cables that reference UFOs.

But after two months of allowing the UFO-obsessed to let their psychotic imaginationsrun wild, Assange may have put a damper on hopes that Area 51′s secrets will finally be exposed.

WikiLeaks’ UFO-related material, Assange says, largely deals with the UFO cult group known as the Raelians, whose beliefs mix religion, sex, pseudo-science and alien mythology. State Department officials in Canada have expressed concern over the group’s influence there, citing a 2002 incident when the group falsely claimed to have cloned humans.

Here’s the transcript of his answer to the question:

I have said in passing there is information about UFOs in Cablegate. And that is true, but these are only small passing references. Most of the material concerns UFO cults, and their behavior in recruiting people. For instance, there is quite a large cable, which we’ll try and release in the next few days, concerning the Raelians, a UFO cult which has a strong presence in Canada and was of concern to the U.S. ambassador in Canada. At that time, the Raelians claimed to have cloned an individual, and fantastically, the press all around the world ate this up and turned it into front page stories.

If this deflates many UFO fans, it may come as more of a shock to the Raelians themselves, who awarded Assange the title of “Honorary Guide to Humanity” in December.

Although the UFO community has placed many of its hopes on Assange and even suggested that he may have subconsciously revealed backwards encrypted messages about aliens in his 60 Minutes interview, the WikiLeaks founder’s disdain for the Raelian cult shouldn’t come as a surprise. In answering Guardian readers’ questions in December, he complained that “weirdos email us about UFOs or how they discovered that they were the anti-christ whilst talking with their ex-wife at a garden party over a pot-plant.” WikiLeaks has also long battled the Church of Scientology, and Assange himself fought with the Church’s lawyers as early as the mid-90s, when anti-Scientology sites were hosted on the Internet service provider he co-founded, Suburbia.net.

In interviews, Assange has also railed against paranoiacs who tout false conspiracies, citing the 9/11 Truth movement. “There are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed conspiracy theories. It’s important not to confuse these two,” Assange told the Belfast Telegraph last July. “I’m constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as [those that surround] 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud.”

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Excuse me Mr. Know-It-All. Your article is so ridiculous I can’t even imagine what possessed you to write it. Its one thing to be a skeptic but your arrogance and insulting slant is unexcusable. And I guess you feel no remorse about it… You pigscratch has so many names, insults, and slurs that I felt compelled to take a shit right here. The Raelians are too kind to you.

Mr. Greenberg has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. While there are indeed naive, overly-imaginative and, yes, even psychotic persons who prattle on about the UFO phenomenon, there are also highly-credible persons with an informed, insider’s perspective on the subject.

I have researched nuclear weapons-related UFO sightings for 38 years, utilizing declassified U.S. government documents and the testimony of more than 120 former/retired U.S. military personnel.

On September 27, 2010, I co-sponsored a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., during which seven of those individuals discussed their personal UFO experiences at nuclear weapons sites, including incidents involving ICBM malfunctions which occurred just as USAF Security Police were reporting one or more disc-shaped craft hovering near the missiles.

CNN streamed the event live and thousands of online articles/broadcast news stories about it have appeared worldwide. Forbes carried the press release announcing the event, which was once at www.forbes.com/…/prnewswire201010141400PR_NEWS_USPR_____DC82378.html

The CNN video, with subtitles, is at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jUU4Z8QdHI

The legal affidavits submitted by the participants, as well as the declassified documents presented to the media during the event, may be found at:

Love it, nothing but the truth in your post and that press conference! I have some other information for you (roberthastings) on this topic. I have also researched this from a vary young age (10/y to now 25/y) . Being vary particular in what information I choose to continue researching. E.G. if there is no official documents it probably is nothing but lies or the truth hazed and stretched. Or if the person(s) I am receiving information from exhibit any signs of deception I end it right there. (My job entails me to read people from the time of contact to time of departure. Due to legal reasons I cannot divulge my career. All I ask is you please respect that, and all information I have will be given to you.)

P.S: My thought; “There is truth in plane sight. But told it is something entirely different than what it really is!”

I’m not familiar with Rael’s movement, though I won’t make an immediate judgment on his work or its validity without first investigating it, despite the snap judgment this article would have me apply uncritically.

That UFOs exist is not a controversial topic. They do and they have for many years. There are massive eye witness documentation of unrelated persons describing sightings of identical strange aerial phenomena over rural and urban areas across the world, as well as video and photo documentation of a few cases, including by NASA space telescopes pointed at earth.

What is controversial is the EXPLANATION given as to the origin and nature of these phenomena. I personally am of the mind that the most irrefutable of the sightings are examples of secretive military technologies that have not been disclosed to the public: a practice fully protected under US laws and those of other nations. Just read about the 1990 Radiation Victims Compensation Act, for one of many, many examples of horrible collateral damage to an undisclosed nuclear testing regime that took place in Nevada throughout the 1950s. Same case with Agent Orange and White Phosphorous, both of which are still in use. Or listen to Bill Clinton’s 1990s public apology for victims of the MKULTRA program.

After the grand hoaxes of the Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia conflict, dozens of covert assassination & US-sponsored military juntas of democratically elected leaders across Latin America, Africa and Asia during the 20th C, the fabricated and illegal War in Iraq and the unending abuses of innocent Afghani and Pakistani captives, tortured and held indefinitely without charge, in secret military prisons without access to lawyers or the outside world, in the name of the dubious worldwide War on Terror, then it is only the naive and unintelligent that refuse to address the major problem of state secrecy, covert operations and subversion of the rule of law by unaccountable state parties.

Aliens? That probably is tinfoil hat territory, since physics shows that they’d have a damn hard time reaching us from distant stars, ships intact.

so, because our understanding of physics is limited to the point that we cannot imagine how we could possibly travel interstellerly, it’s impossible? people who believe in the existence of life besides our own in this unimaginably vast universe must wear tinfoil hats and have psychotic thought processes? you sir, are an asshole.

If this article is true, especially the part about what Assange said about 9/11, let alone the ufos, I am more and more convinced that Assange is an agent of information AND disinformation. Either he is too afraid for his life to reveal and back up the truth, or he is working for the elite

Why do the mass media try to ridicule those who believe we have been visited? Any other topic with this amount of witness testimony would be worthy of scientific investigation, yet the pathetic name-calling and ignorance of the facts prevail. I look forward to the day that the truth emerges, and hope all these so called journalists apologise for their unprofessional behaviour. Why has the author of this piece not looked at the evidence to make an informed decision? And why are those who swallow everything their governments tell them deemed sceptics? I pray for the return of free press. This attempt at journalism is no more than brown nosing Rupert Murdoch. Keep playing the game Greenberg, but the world is waking up and your days are numbered. Here’s an idea – how about an article on the ludicrous situation that has allowed Rupert Murdoch to actually buy the mainstream media? Or the evidence of massive cover ups as regards UFOs? There should be no place for name calling/ridicule in journalism. You should truly be ashamed of yourself.